Summary

At Reaume’s Trading Post - a late 18th-century fur trade winter camp located in Central Minnesota – the acquisition of food and the trade for pelts left a varied assemblage of faunal remains on the site. The results from the faunal analysis suggest a deep entanglement of ways and peoples in a context where members of fur trade society shared, contested and interacted around a common need: food. What kinds of meat products were consumed or sought after by the traders, voyageurs, trappers and hunters that frequented the post? Did the butchering happen on site or was meat brought to the post as discrete parts? How were the remains discarded? After two years of excavating the site as a field school run by the University of Minnesota, this paper provides answers to these and other questions by focusing on the analysis of the faunal remains collected over the two seasons.